Our Instructors
Meg Eden's work is published (or forthcoming) in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel "Post-High School Reality Quest” (2017), and the forthcoming poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” (2020). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games (https://super.magfest.org/mages-blog). Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal.
Melanie Figg is the author of the award-winning poetry collection, Trace, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. As a certified professional coach, she has helped hundreds of writers to publish, tame their inner critics, and add more creativity, balance, and intentionality to their lives. She also leads annual women's writing retreats. More about her at: www.melaniefigg.net
Laura Gehl is the award-winning author of nearly twenty picture and board books including One Big Pair of Underwear (Charlotte Zolotow Highly Commended Title, International Literacy Association Honor Book, Booklist Books for Youth Editors’ Choice); the Peep and Egg series (Parents’ Choice Recommendation, Amazon Editors’ Pick, Children’s Choice Book Award Finalist); My Pillow Keeps Moving (Junior Library Guild selection, New York Public Library Best Books of 2018 selection); and I Got a Chicken for My Birthday (Kirkus Best Picture Books of 2018 selection). Her recent picture book, Except When They Don’t (Little Bee), received a starred review from School Library Journal as well as the Northern Lights Book Award in the poetry category. Upcoming releases include Judge Juliette (Sterling); Apple and Magnolia (Walker Books); Willa’s Sleepover (Page Street Kids); Baby Paleontologist (HarperCollins); Weird Animals and Weird Birds (Abrams); Cat Has a Plan (Simon & Schuster); the Baby Loves Sports series (Simon & Schuster); and May Saves the Day (Capstone). Laura lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with her husband and four children. Visit her online at www.lauragehl.com.
Zara González Hoang grew up surrounded by stories, but didn’t realize she wanted to tell them until she started reading stories to her son. She’s the illustrator of Thread of Love by Kabir & Surishtha Sehgal (Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster) and the author and illustrator of A New Kind of Wild, which will be published in April 2020 by Dial Books. She’s currently illustrating a book for Candlewick Press and writing her next story. She lives in a magical suburban forest outside of DC.
Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters (forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press), and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She has her MBA from University of Baltimore and her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She loves nail polish, wine, and tattoos. Read her publications on her blog: www.wordperv.com. Follow her on twitter: @wordperv, and IG: @wordperv79.
Megan Wagner Lloyd is the author of the picture books Finding Wild, Fort-Building Time, and Building Books, published by Knopf/Random House, and Paper Mice, published by Simon and Schuster. Upcoming books include The ABCs of Catching Zs, from Chronicle Books, and the kids' graphic novel Allergic, with Graphix/Scholastic. She lives with her family in the Washington, D.C. area.
Lisa Lowry founded The Writer’s Passage with the purpose of building a community of writers in Northern Virginia. She has a graduate degree in public policy. Her fiction has been published in Mash Stories and Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review. She enjoys miniature worlds, verse novels, and playing on the static trapeze.
Sita Romero received an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Her stories have been published with Third Flatiron and Transmundane Press. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, kids, two dogs, and over two hundred and fifty board games.www.sitacromero.com
Marjory Ruderman coaches and performs longform improvisational comedy with Charlottesville’s Big Blue Door. Her writing career spans many genres, including a satirical newspaper, museum exhibit labels, magazine feature, and lots of public health policy reports. She’s currently working on picture books.
Thierry Sagnier is a writer who has been published in the United States and abroad. He is the author of The IFO Report, Bike! Motorcycles and the People who Ride Them, Washington by Night, and, The Fortunate Few. His novel Thirst was an Amazon No. 1 bestseller and his short story Lunch with the General, published in Chrysalis Reader, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
His latest novel, L’Amérique, was published by Apprentice Press and also attained Amazon bestseller status. Two novels are forthcoming. Montparnasse, will be published in October 2019, and Dope will be published in February 2020.
His plays have been performed at Tada Theatre in New York City, the East End Fringe Festival, in New York State, and the Vienna Players in Fairfax, Virginia. He lives in Virginia.
Brian Daniel Schwartz writes in many forms but his true, long, everlasting love is movies. Brian has an EP of original songs called Man, co-produced, co-wrote and co-directed (with Karen Snyder) the play Interconnected, has scribed three feature-length screenplays, and made numerous short films including All I’m Asking For (written by and starring India Autry), which screened at the 2018 World Music and Independent Film Festival. He was a member of Improbable Players educational theater troupe when he lived in Boston, and does stand-up comedy in DC when there’s a blue moon.
Brian has degrees from Pomona College and Lesley University, and is a certified Integral Coach through New Ventures West. He loves asking people meaningful questions that get their neurons firing in new directions, nurturing and cultivating creative possibility.
Erin Teagan is the author of the Luciana series, American Girl’s 2018 Girl of the Year, The Friendship Experiment, and Survivor Girl (Clarion, 2019), a Junior Library Guild Selection. She worked in science for more than ten years before becoming a writer and uses many of her experiences from the lab in her books. She loves sharing the best and most interesting (and most dangerous and disgusting) parts of science with kids. Erin lives in Virginia with her family, a hound dog named Beaker, and a bunny that thinks he’s a cat. www.erinteagan.com
Lee Woodman’s essays and poems have been published in Tiferet Journal, Zócalo Public Square, Grey Sparrow Press, The Ekphrastic Review, vox poetica, The New Guard Review, and The Concord Monitor. A Pushcart nominee, she was awarded an Individual Poetry Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for FY 2019. Her poetry collection, Homescapes, will be published by Finishing Line Press in May 2020. www.poetleewoodman.com